From the archive
Tuning Canabalt Part 2: Audio
On October 20, 2010, Adam Saltsman followed his post on Canabalt's numbers with one on its sound: effects made from the second-to-last day of development, and the cheap, clever ways he made them.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
Believable, not 8-bit
His earlier games used SFXR, a free synthesizer for chirpy retro effects. Canabalt sounded different in his head: not like its inspiration, Super Mario, but like a movie or a modern game, with believable sounds that ground the action in a reality players feel.
Two ways to rough out an effect
- Search and edit: find free stock sounds and change them in Audacity with bass boost, pitch and speed changes and reversing.
- Home foley: record with the laptop's own microphone, perform each effect eight or ten times in one take, and keep the best.
The polish
Each effect went through Audacity's noise removal, using the quiet stretches between takes as the noise sample, and often a little bass boost for presence. Because the runner always sits at the far left of the screen and obstacles come from the right, the effects are panned to match, with the runner's own sounds at about 3 on a scale of 10 to the left.
Frequent sounds come in variations picked at random: four footsteps for the rooftops and four for the crane, so the steps never fall into a predictable pattern.
The music
Danny Baranowsky, also the composer of Super Meat Boy and Gravity Hook HD, wrote the soundtrack, and the post closes with a short interview with him about the music half of the game.